Twelve Houses, Twelve Rooms
Twelve Houses, twelve rooms…
Each room holds a different part of being alive. One represents your beginning, another is what you love and what you value. One is home, one is work; one is who you become when you finally step out into the world.
Astrology calls these the twelve houses, and from the outside they can sound intimidating, but I promise they're not. Each one is simply a room, and over the coming weeks I am going to walk you through all twelve, one at a time, in plain language.
No background needed. Just come in.
What a house actually is
Here is the first thing worth clearing up, because the word itself gets in the way. A house in astrology has nothing to do with a building, rather, each represents an ordinary area of life. Home and family, career and work, love and partnership. Your most quiet, inner world you rarely show anyone.
So when an astrologer says a planet sits in your fourth house, nothing mystical is being claimed. They are saying that this part of you likes to spend its time in the room marked home. That is all. A house is a room, and a placement is simply telling you which room your parts live in.
One tangle worth untying while we are here, because it trips nearly everyone. The signs (Cancer, Taurus, Aquarius, the twelve most people already know by name) describe manner, the how; the houses describe location, the where.
Where the rooms come from
This is the part I find genuinely fascinating, and it is where two of my personal obsessions meet.
Natal charts are depicted in a wheel, each wheel divided into twelve sections. Those divisions are neither decorative nor equal, they are calculated based on three specific things: the date you were born, the time you were born, and the exact place on earth where it happened. Change any one of them by a few hours or miles, and the rooms as they lay in the chart shift.
This all means your twelve rooms are extremely unique, like a fingerprint, shaped by one particular morning, on one particular patch of the planet, at one particular minute. Honestly, reading and interpreting a natal chart is closer to surveying than to fortune telling. Real coordinates, real math, measured to the degree.
One side of my art sees endless beauty in this precision. The other side, the side that uses watercolor to breathe color and movement into it, uses the inherent unpredictability of the medium to create a piece of art unique to one person each and every time. Watercolor blooms, bleeds, and refuses to sit still, despite the structure of the chart itself being exact. The surface is alive, just as a chart is both at once, and so are you.
A quick walk down the hall
Twelve rooms, all off a central hall, each one the door to parts of each of us in specific ways. The arrangement is always in order, and the first house always sits directly and exactly, to the degree, across from the seventh, the second across from the eighth, and so on all the way around.
The first house is arrival: the moment you took your first breath and became a separate person. It holds your first impression, the self people meet before you have said a word.
The fourth house is home. Not only where you live, but where you come from, your family, your roots, and who you are when nobody is watching.
The seventh house is partnership, where the chart turns from I to we: marriage, the beloved, the business partner, even the rival. The tenth house is your place in the world, your calling, your reputation, the thing you become known for.
Notice something already. The fourth and the tenth sit directly across from one another, the private self and the public self facing off across your chart. The first and the seventh do the same, I and you. The rooms are in conversation, making each and every chart a picture rather than a list.
One honest note before we start
What I will share in this series is the timeless character of each room, the first house always concerning arrival, the fourth always representing home; this much holds true of every chart ever drawn.
But your rooms are yours. In your own chart they are sized and angled by the exact moment and place you arrived, which is why no two charts are ever quite the same, and why an astrologer will always ask you for your birth time. That particular sky and resulting story is what I paint and interpret.
Where we go from here
Next week, before we open a single door, I want to show you the shape of the house itself: the four corners it is built on, why the rooms are not the same size, and the rhythm the hall keeps. After that we begin at the first house and walk the whole hall, one room per week, ending in the quietest room of all.
You do not need to memorize anything, nor will you need to have read a word about astrology before today. Come as you are, and by the end you will gain a better understanding of what you are seeing.
The shape of the house, next week.
If you would like to see your own sky painted, calculated to the degree and made entirely by hand, my studio is open!